Saul Zaentz obit

Saul Zaentz obituary

Oscar-winning film producer behind One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Amadeus and The English Patient

He was not on the list.

The career of the film producer Saul Zaentz, who has died aged 92, was marked not only by his independence (his productions were often largely self-funded) but also by his dedication to each individual film. Unlike most producers, who have numerous projects on the go, Zaentz worked on just one at a time. This resulted in a relatively short CV but one with a high share of Oscars, including three best picture winners: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), Amadeus (1984) and The English Patient (1996).

Zaentz was born in Passaic, New Jersey, the youngest of five children of Russian-Polish Jewish parents, Morris and Goldie. An avid reader and a fan of pop music, movies and sport, he ran away from home as a teenager to work at the St Louis Cardinals baseball team's training camp, then rode freight trains and hitchhiked across the country, experiencing the effects of the Great Depression before returning home. He enlisted in the army in the second world war, serving as a sergeant-major on an army transport moving troops to the Mediterranean, north Atlantic and south and central Pacific.

He once said that, on demobilisation, he wanted a chicken farm and took a degree in poultry husbandry but after six weeks of work – "14 hours a day, a half day off every other week" – he knew it wasn't for him. Taking off to St Louis to watch the last two weeks of the baseball season, he enrolled there in a business college studying accounting and business administration. In 1948 he settled in San Francisco, which he had first visited when on the road and again for the World's Fair in 1939.

He found a job with record distributors, and later went to New York to work with Norman Granz, a jazz record producer and concert promoter. This led him to handle concerts by Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck and Stan Getz. He returned to San Francisco in 1955 to join the Weiss brothers, Max and Sol, who operated a plastic moulding business that included a record-pressing plant which Brubeck used. As a result of the relative success of the plant, they established the Fantasy record label. Zaentz established wide distribution not only for musicians such as Brubeck and Gerry Mulligan but also for the hip 1950s comics Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl.

Zaentz later headed a group of investors who bought out the Weiss brothers, established a subsidiary, Galaxy Records, and acquired Debut Records, which had been founded by Charles Mingus and Mingus's then wife, Celia. Zaentz married Celia in 1960. Fantasy's major breakthrough came with recording the then unknown rock group the Golliwogs, who achieved success under their new name Creedence Clearwater Revival.

Zaentz then became involved with film, working on Payday (1973), which starred Rip Torn as a country singer. It failed at the box office but gained a cult reputation. Having been an avid reader since childhood, it was perhaps inevitable that Zaentz would produce films based on novels. This began when he joined forces with Michael Douglas to produce the Miloš Forman-directed adaptation of Ken Kesey's novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Set in a mental institution, this was not an obvious subject to turn into a movie but it turned out to be an enormous critical and box-office success, winning five Oscars, six Baftas and six Golden Globes.


Zaentz then acquired certain rights to JRR Tolkien's epic novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, for which he set up Middle-Earth Enterprises. The company produced an animated feature of The Lord of the Rings in 1978, and produced and licensed other screen and stage productions, leading to the films directed by Peter Jackson, as well as merchandise based on the Tolkien novels.

Forman alerted Zaentz to Peter Shaffer's stage play Amadeus. With Zaentz as producer and Forman as director, it won eight Oscars. Zaentz's next four productions were all based on novels: The Mosquito Coast (1986, adapted from Paul Theroux), The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988, from Milan Kundera), At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1991, from Peter Matthiessen) and The English Patient (from Michael Ondaatje). The last of these, directed by Anthony Minghella, dominated the 1997 Academy Awards, winning nine Oscars; Zaentz also received the Irving G Thalberg memorial award at the ceremony. His final production, Goya's Ghosts (2006), unusually based on an original screenplay, was directed by Forman.

In 1980, he set up the Saul Zaentz Film Centre in Berkeley, California, which provided production and post-production facilities for his own and other major titles. It closed in 2004. In the previous year, Zaentz was awarded a Bafta fellowship.

Zaentz was divorced from his wife Lynda Redfield. He is survived by the children from his marriage to Celia – Athena, Jonathan and Joshua; by Dorian, Celia's son with Charles Mingus; and by seven grandchildren.

• Saul Zaentz, film producer, born 28 February 1921; died 3 January 2014.